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The heavens are full of indescribable sights. It is always there, it is true, it is beautiful, majestic, and inspires us to reach out to it - to strive to know how we are significant in such a magnificent universe.

The Value Sell helps people create strategic content that is designed to communicate the unique value of a company and its products. Content that is significant in our digital age. While everyone now has access to vast amounts of content and they may be confused by so much stuff, if the content is significant to them and they can find it, they will respond to it in a way that makes it their own.

Strategic content that communicates value should strive to compliment upper management's strategy, which may, but not always utilize knowledge of products or customers. It's makes the process difficult when the content communicators do not understand why the overall strategy is important to enabling product acceptance and customer adoption. Working together on different levels to communicate the strategic value of content can be motivating to both employees inside as well as customers outside the organization. No one will be motivated unless they believe that what they are trying to achieve is true and that it will work.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it...

Jonathan Swift in The Examiner 1710

Now that we are firmly planted in the digital age there are lots of sophisticated new ways to enable falsehoods to spread wildly over a vast number of channels, ultimately achieving the impression of being true. Marwan Kraidy of the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania recently said in the Gazette "Plato's metaphor of the cave, where people mistake shadows for the real thing is on steroids in the digital age." It is becoming more and more difficult to trust what we see, hear or feel. The daily newspaper has lost its edge, and even though some of the local news may be useful, the medium is considered old school by many. Digital information is so appealing with its convenience and timeliness. So even though the information is rapidly passed around, and it is difficult to know who the source was, when it was published, why, and whether it is true, we still seem to consider digital the only way to go. How do you know what you are seeing is true, and where it comes from when looking at it on the web? How do you know if it is trustworthy?

Communicating value today is a dynamic process. Things change all the time and the credibility of anything is always in question. So many scams, so many false promises floating around the web, and a lot of people don't seem to even care about the truth. Sometimes all they want is entertainment. The web is a mixed bag of all kinds of things catering to all kinds of interests. Focusing on specific audience preferences can help but everyone still should be suspicious. It has become the nature of the digital medium.

Our minds are organized to gather information that confirms our current values and beliefs. In other words, we are attracted to and search for information that is desirable or comfortable, and once we accept this information, it helps to manage our coherence and confirm our bias.These both contribute to a natural tendency to filter out information that does not conform to our world view. Plus, since we have a limited capacity for paying attention, we select and choose to focus only on content that appeals to us. Overcoming our selective attention has always been an objective of business people trying to reach out to a target audience with their content, but now with the speed and scope of digital content this is a driving force resisting acceptance.